All gods sort of blur together, I guess

Sorry, gang. I thought this music video by Katy Perry was eminently forgettable pop, overproduced and not particularly interesting, but you get to see it anyway.

In case you had too much taste to bother, Katy Perry plays an ancient Egyptian pharoah — you know, pyramids, stilted poses, animal-headed gods, etc. — who disintegrates a series of suitors with magic and takes their treasure. Really, that’s it. Only one of the suitors (at about 1:10 in the video) is wearing a necklace with a squiggle in it that some Muslims claim resembles the name of Allah, so this video is a work of blasphemy. You’ll have to look very closely to even see it (also, it looks like the few frames where the emblem was visible have already been edited out).

disintegratingsuitor

I know! Why are Muslims upset? It’s all those followers of Anubis and Bastet and Osiris and so forth who ought to be up in arms! But it’s certain flaky weird Muslims who are posting a petition demanding that the video be taken down. Makes sense; the polytheistic religion of ancient Egypt, founded around 3100 BCE, and monotheistic Islam, founded around 600 CE, are so easily confused.

This is the reason for lodging the petition so that people from different walks of life, different religions and from different parts of the world, agree that the video promotes blasphemy, using the name of God in an irrelevant and distasteful manner would be considered inappropriate by any religion.

Isn’t it heartwarming that there are people who dedicate their time and effort to protecting the delicate sensibilities of invisible imaginary super-powerful beings?

Anyway, if you think Katy Perry needs some urging to resist the efforts of kooks to suppress her commercially lucrative work, there is a counter-petition. It seems superfluous to me, but OK.

The one question in my mind is why are fanatical Muslims stepping frame by frame through Katy Perry videos anyway?

Oh, lord, the stupid…

In the expected counterattack from sexists defending Ben Radford’s obtuse sexism, there are now demented dingbats accusing me of being a veritable MRA and implying that I’m some kind of hypocrite, because I have in the past been subject to an abortive false accusation. I mentioned this in a comment four years ago (some people are obsessive in following my every word, and I should be flattered, I suppose — I must be very interesting). Here’s the dry account of the event that I gave then:

I won’t meet privately with students either — I always keep my office door wide open, and when I’m working with students in the lab, I find excuses to move out and let them work on their own if it turns into a one-on-one event. I just can’t afford the risk.

I was also subject to accusations of harassment, once upon a time. A female student came into my lab when I was alone, unhappy about an exam grade, and openly threatened me — by going public with a story about a completely nonexistent sexual encounter right there.

Zoom, I was right out the door at that instant; asked a female grad student in the lab next door to sit with the student for a bit, and went straight to the chair of the department to explain the situation. I had to work fast, because I knew that if it turned into a he-said-she-said story, it wouldn’t matter that she was lying, it could get dragged out into an investigation that would easily destroy my career, no matter that I was innocent.

I was in a total panic, knowing full well how damaging that kind of accusation can be. Fortunately, I’d done the right thing by blowing it all wide open at the first hint of a threat, and getting witnesses on the spot.

There is nothing inconsistent about this. False accusations do happen, and they can have extremely damaging consequences (which I said previously: “Yes, they happen…rarely. They’re important to detect.”) Obviously, I had just explained that I certainly do know of at least one case in which a desperate student tried to cheat her way to a better grade with an accusation. It happens.

How I responded to that instance is just part of a protocol for how people should work together. Here’s what I do:

  • I don’t harass women, or anyone for that matter.

  • I maintain complete transparency. Not only do I not harass women, but any accusation that I do founders on the implausibility of the circumstance.

  • I deal with any potential situation by defusing it immediately. Not arguing, not protesting my innocence, not begging the person to refrain from hurting my reputation, but going straight to departmental authorities and explaining the situation. Again, transparency: the slander isn’t going to stick.

  • I bring in witnesses, preferably women too, who can testify to my innocence. And I don’t just mean people who will say I’m a nice guy, but witnesses to the incident who can describe all the details of the event.

  • I keep myself protected against false claims, which also means that I’m keeping my students protected from any harm. We all work just fine together, with nothing to hide.

  • I don’t sexually harass my students or colleagues. Period.

Not only is my reputation spotless, and honestly so, but there’s no way to even realistically bring such a charge against me. And of course the great majority of my interactions with students bear no risk of any such problems — we can trust each other.

But then, there are always people like those slimy ones, that minority of nasty untrustworthy liars commenting on Radford’s thread, who are happy to distort and make false accusations, and I deal with them in the same way that I did that earlier incident: with transparency and honesty and frank admission of what actually happened. I don’t deny that such unpleasant people exist, especially when so many of them are already populating that thread and the existence of contemptible liars is so apparent. But when one has no interest in harassing people, it turns out to be relatively easy to maintain one’s integrity — I don’t have years of stalkerish behavior and complaints and administrative disciplinary actions to make excuses for, unlike some people.

QFT

AFT

AFT
“When I was a boy on the Mississipi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.”

‘

That Mark Twain was a smart fella.

Oscar’s golden night

I had the Academy Awards tuned in to the background last night. I’m not a fan; like many of us, I just like to gawp and snipe at overprivileged rich people, so it was just occasionally entertaining noise to catch my attention in between papers. Here are the things that made me bother to look up.

  • Ellen Degeneres was generally amiable and pleasant, but the stunt where she ordered out for pizza and delivered it to obscenely wealthy, pretty people in clothes that may have cost more than some people make in a year? That was…disturbing and klunky. It wasn’t Macfarlane-awful, but just vaguely icky.

  • Gravity won best director. No, that was a terrible movie! The star was Orbital Mechanics, but Orbital Mechanics was falling-down drunk every day on the set, and Orbie kept sticking his face in front of the camera, even in scenes where he shouldn’t have been, and Cuarón just let him get away with it.

  • John Travolta seemed to be stoned on smug, and couldn’t even manage to introduce someone properly, and called Idina Menzel “Adele Nazeem”. That was probably the name of a clam he knew in a past life.

  • The award for the most embarrassingly stupid acceptance speech goes to Matthew McConaughey, who, in accepting an award for the role of a guy dying of AIDS, rambled on slickly and at length in praise of a god. I was already peeved — I was hoping Bruce Dern would win — so it did not console me that someone deserving had won it anyway.

  • Oh, yeah, Nebraska got skunked. I had expectations that it would do well…it was one of my favorite movies this year. Something about a cranky old guy in a small midwestern town just spoke to me.

  • Cate Blanchett thanked Woody Allen.

  • Lupita Nyong’o gave the best speech of the evening. She won for a harrowing role, and it was well-deserved.

  • 12 Years a Slave won best picture. For once, I could agree with the Academy’s choice in this category — that was a powerful movie.

  • Holy crap, it ended on time?

I’m on my way to #scio14

That’s not good news. The good news will be “I’m at #scio14“, because I’ve got a lot of traveling ahead of me. And it’s been one of those days that I always dread: the day I have to return tests in genetics. I write hard tests…well, not really that hard conceptually, but I avoid questions of a form that allows them to be answered with rote execution of a formula, which means that students who are struggling to understand often end up taking weird detours in their answers, and do poorly. And then there’s the usual bimodal grade distribution of a class that emphasizes logic and methodology; some find it trivial, others just freak out. Everyone is miserable, and it makes lecturing no fun at all.

But I can’t do otherwise. I’ll throw more practice problems at them, and drill them through the process over and over again, and usually, most of them will make it through to the end.

Anyway, now I’m off to the airport. Long drive, long night, get into Raleigh-Durham sometime tomorrow. Then I have to be the student for a few days and learn.

I hope there isn’t an exam at the end.

Thousands of channels and nothing on

So much junk. So much failed ambition. It seems like even the cable channels that are set up with high purpose (hello, History/Discovery/Learning channels) immediately succumb to the lure of the lowest common denominator and turn into dreck, so where is The Sportsman Channel to go?

Wait, you say, the Sportsman Channel doesn’t sound that awful; sure, it’s not educational, maybe, but it could be about honest entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. To which I reply, “SyFy channel.”

But what could a channel about hunting and fishing do to degrade their starting premise? Behold. Now you know, you can always dig through the floor of the basement.

[Read more…]

Ken Ham and I agree on something

There’s this new movie coming out, Noah, by Darren Aronofsky and with a top-notch cast…and it looks like crap.

I can get into a good fantasy story, but not one that takes itself so seriously and purports to be based on a true story. And you know this one is going to be peddled to the public as a good old Bible story, so of course it must be wholesome and good and true. So I’m unimpressed and uninterested.

So is Ken Ham, but for different reasons. He hates it because it is so unbiblical. He’s got a list of deviations from the One True Bible story, and apparently his followers saw it and are leaving youtube comments threatening to boycott the movie because it’s too worldly and godless. Who knew youtube comments could get even stupider?

  1. In the film, Noah was robbed of his birthright by Tubal-Cain. The serpent’s body (i.e., Satan), which was shed in Eden, was their “birthright reminder.” It also doubled with magical power that they would wrap around their arm. So weird!
  2. Noah’s family only consists of his wife, three sons, and one daughter-in-law, contrary to the Bible.
  3. It appears as if every species was crammed in the Ark instead of just the kinds of animals, thus mocking the Ark account the same way secularists do today.
  4. “Rocks” (that seem to be fallen angels) build the Ark with Noah!
  5. Methuselah (Noah’s grandfather) is a type of witch-doctor, whose mental health is questionable.
  6. Tubal-Cain defeats the Rocks who were protecting the finished Ark.
  7. A wounded Tubal-Cain axes his way inside the Ark in only about ten minutes and then hides inside. Tubal-Cain then convinces the middle son to lure Noah to the bottom of the Ark in order to murder him (because he was not allowed a wife in the Ark). Tubal-Cain stays alive by eating hibernating lizards. The middle son of Noah has a change of heart and helps kill Tubal-Cain instead.
  8. Noah becomes almost crazy as he believes the only purpose to his family’s existence was to help build the Ark for the “innocent” animals (this is a worship of creation).
  9. Noah repeatedly tells his family that they were the last generation and were never to procreate. So when his daughter-in-law becomes pregnant, he vows to murder his own grandchild. But he finally has a change of heart.
  10. Noah does not have a relationship with God but rather with circumstances and has deadly visions of the Flood.
  11. The Ark lands on a cliff next to a beach.
  12. After the Flood Noah becomes so distant from his family that he lives in a cave, getting drunk by the beach.

There were many other bizarre, unbiblical aspects in the preview cut. Though it’s possible that some of these elements may not make the final cut (though we suspect most will), compare the above list to the trailer that has just been released! The comparison should be very revealing for you. You wouldn’t get much of a hint of most of the biblical problems in the list above based on watching on this cleverly-put-together trailer. A real con job, to be frank!

Yeah, the guy who’s trying to build a Noah’s Ark theme park with junk bonds is claiming that the movie is a con job.

The movie sounds nutty from all the weird nonsense in that plot description, but then, the raw story straight from the bible is also absurd. And why is he complaining about #12? The lizard-eating stowaway isn’t in the Bible, but that part certainly is, in Genesis 9:20-25:

20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

Cheer up

I woke up this morning feeling dreadfully oogie — I might be dying, slowly, sinking into decrepitude and all that. Darn.

So, anyway, I found this.

Feeling slightly better. Might be able to crawl into work. My dissolution into mucus and slime and rotting meat is…deferred. On a cosmic scale, not for long, mind you.